The week in dance: The Crucible; The Bright Stream – review — theguardian.com

It’s surprisingly hard to make a new narrative ballet that captures hearts and minds. Swan Lake, Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty are so regularly performed because they somehow speak beyond their formal steps to something deeper in the human soul. In recent years, Christopher Wheeldon (particularly with 2011’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and Alexei Ratmansky (see below) have begun to find new themes that resonate. John Neumeier keeps flying the torch in works that are popular on the continent. But there aren’t many new works that tell stories to rival the old.

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